@ganymede That's why we have paralegals such as Frank Castle.
Best posts made by Arkandel
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RE: Who are you?
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RE: Ideal Scene Length?
@meg said in Ideal Scene Length?:
@arkandel Yeah, I do like them organic, too. But if I am going for a length, I'd rather go for shorter rather than longer. Because I feel like if you are trying to go long, you are forcing things into the play that would never happen. Unless you have a really solid reason to hang around an unknown person for a long time (trapped in an elevator, closing on a house, etc), who here like, meets someone and spends a day with them? And scenarios where you are trapped with a new person probably just would not be fun to play, and probably should have some FF and handwave.
Oh agreed. And for some players there is no patience; if there is a suspicion of rapport, of a romantic match or political agreement or they are playing with someone they know and like OOC they keep pushing it to go longer even when there's no IC reason for it. The easy marker for such a scenario is when a significant portion of a scene is about one topic ("gee, the Prince is such a tyrant, amirite?") and then it's about something else ("I need a new armor, can you make one for me?") when it could warrant a second meeting.
That's how you burn out on people, too. I won't say I haven't had partners I seemed to spend 90% of my time scening with because I have because they were that good, but that's not the norm. If I get to the point I want to do other scenes and can't we're gonna need to have a (hopefully friendly) OOC chat.
Mostly I have found short and sweet is a really good way to lay a foundation, without really knowing what the foundation is? Letting it build from there in little bits. (Or even when I do have a pre-planned relationship, like Teagan/Sebastian being apped in as pals. It feels more real if we develop that relationship in short scenes where we aren't stretching it to weird places.)
Agreed, with a caveat: People vanish, and activity varies. Hey, those were two caveats! But to expand:
One of my faults (I have some, don't gasp now) is I sometimes spend too much time building things up, both with my PCs and PrPs. So while that can be perfectly enjoyable for all parties MUSHers are a fickle bunch and they can stop logging on, which can leave things feel a bit... wasted. LIke it was still fun while it lasted but it'd sure have been nice to have seen the end of that plot, y'know?
The other thing is activity. Let's say I play three times as much as you do because you have a life, so we start building a story up that could end up with our werewolf PCs making a pack together - yay! But every time you log in I unload a shitload of stuff that I've been doing, PrPs I took part in, NPCs my character encountered so that building a foundation is genuinely complicated. Every scene can feel like it's catching up to something instead of building up toward something.
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RE: RL things I love
@paris said in RL things I love:
My new instant pot.
Now I just need to figure out how to cook rice or noodles + chicken in it at the same time.
I my instant pot. It's so amazing, even though I use it for the same two things (chicken breasts, pulled pork) like 90% of the time.
But even for that it's holy-shit good, tender, moist meat for the time investment.
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RE: Storytelling
@Derp said:
Get togethery type things are not plot.
You need both. Uptime and downtime, action sequences and slow burning scenes where characters interact to figure out that they've changed, or how.
Character development -does- happen there for certain types of characters. Discriminating against this type of thing, and these types of characters, is a huge trigger of mine. There are books and books and books out there where this sort of thing is -central- to the plot. Calling it NotPlot is narrowminded and elitist.
See, obviously your mileage may vary but to me the lure of plot isn't in the development which happens during them. I mean it still can in the right scene, but that's not their upside.
As far as I'm concerned the actual benefit of ST-ran scenes is in the fallout afterwards, in the cascading effect of letting the ripples of these big things reach different aspects of your IC existence - letting your friends now, manoeuvring politically to rally support from allies, etc. And it's absolutely in the enrichment of your character's existent through these new events since no matter what great chemistry I sometimes have with others renewal is essential or sooner or later we'll sit down and have that talk again. In a vacuum plot-lines eventually become incestuous, they get recycled. They need refreshing.
The only risk - speaking for myself - in participating in as many things as you can is that in the same long run a character like that has lived a really fucked-up life. After a sufficiently long time fighting horrors left and right, solving mysteries and witnessing the rise and fall of mad gods ... it all begins to blend together. Such experiences take their toll, and that might be counter-thematic to what some people want to play. Me, I usually roll characters for whom such a fate isn't contrary to what I'm trying to do.
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RE: Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.
@auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
The only time I've discussed my meals with coworkers is in a 'keeping variety in lunches is expensive, yo' sort of way.
Discussing your own habits is perfectly acceptable. We all rant about something.
@auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Aren't people too busy taking gym mirror selfies to judge anyone else anyway?
Insecurity is a very common background among people who're trying to stay fit. A lot of guys I know are pretty serious used to be quite heavy/skinny when they were kids and now they're overcompensating.
But even more so, and I say it with respect and love, being fit is, and should be, a very personal thing. You should be narcissistic in some way; it's your body, your goals, your effort and time, your choice of sports or routines, your motivation and discipline, your way.
It's okay to make it all about you.
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RE: Constructing a FAQ (and what ground to cover)
A good trick is to literally maintain the FAQ with questions you see asked often.
So if you ever think "dammit, I just answered this one yesterday!"... well, that's a good candidate. They don't need to be one-offs.
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RE: criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong
@auspice said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:
Based on a comment made at one point of 'waiting to hear back from <a thread owner>,' I believe Arkandel was asking the game owners if they wanted their ad threads locked down to just the ad post and the discussion moved to a new thread. I don't think he's just going ahead and doing it without go-ahead.
Double post! The comment was about nodebb not providing a convenient way to fork only the original post of a thread but you need to manually click on every other post to fork them into a new one.
Since the HorrorMU thread was pretty active, and recent, I asked Botulism if she didn't mind making a 'new' ad thread instead, which I then locked, and moved the original thread to the Discussions forum. It was really all just basic housekeeping - and how we're doing this going forward.
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RE: Good TV
I mean, it was only a matter of time.
It's also short sighted. The biggest hurdle to piracy is always convenience, and piracy is absolutely the biggest threat to content providers, especially the ones relying on very expensive content to draw people to their service.
So for example let's say you're Netflix and you spend $$$ to make Stranger Things. That's the kind of show you expect subscribers to be lured by, and then stay for the rest of your stuff. Finding this show online is very easy but it's still easier and more convenient to have a Netflix app on your phone and the content is just waiting for you, keeps track of where you left off, suggests similar shows based on your watch habits, etc. Same thing as Game of Thrones, Westworld, etc.
If it becomes too expensive or annoying to have 5 different apps to watch all your stuff then Android Box or your torrent client becomes a more attractive option, and given the budget of these productions they can't afford to miss out on subscribers. Even reduced subscriber growth (let alone loss) can be disastrous when you spend that much money on a small number of shows.
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RE: What's your favorite MU* client?
@ninjakitten said in What's your favorite MU* client?:
I hate coloured text in my MUing, so I'm very happy to stick with SimpleMU since I already have everything set to black on white, always black on white, only black on white. The only thing I wish I could do that I can't is drag and drop the order of my tabs, and I've used it long enough that I really don't ever need to -- I just put things in order to start with. So I'm probably going to end up sticking with SimpleMU until it won't run, I guess.
Text-highlighting triggers are life savers in large scenes for me, just so I don't miss mentions of my character's name in walls of scrolling text. But I don't think I've seen a client yet that doesn't support them.
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RE: Echoes in the Mists - Discussion
@skew said in Echoes in the Mists - CoD 2e MU:
Even with low level magic (people starter at 3-4 in their arcanum), it was still a lot of "hand wave and the problem is fixed". Then at higher levels it was trying to continually reshape the entire world... while 20 mages do it all at once. It got crazy and hard and
See that's obviously a real issue too, but what I think is worse is how Mage... takes over when more spheres are involved. At least in a single-sphere game there's some parity yet once you mix it up it gets tricky - like you're playing an Uratha shaman when this Thyrsus kid walks over and can do stuff you can't even imagine with Spirit.
That sort of thing bums people out since it relies on folks sharing the plot and letting others have their moment to shine, too, which... let's just say doesn't always happen. And in turn it creates a different disparity too - numbers. You start seeing folks flocking to Mage because of what it can do, skewing the demographic as other spheres become less frequented and then it's that classic catch-22 where newcomers don't join because of it, perpetuating the situation.
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RE: Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff
@auspice said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
@arkandel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
@alamias said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
@arkandel This is why I don't live in a place that gets that white stuff all over the ground during winter.
White is nothing. It's the black stuff you care about - black ice. Black ice is a fucking supervillain.
I once dated someone from the south who admitted to me that until he lived for a couple years in a northern state, he thought black ice was something bad drivers made up.
And then he encountered it.
Until I came to Canada I thought black ice was a cool Shadowrun term. So.
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RE: What's your favorite MU* client?
@three-eyed-crow I kinda wish someone I could throw money at someone who made a fully featured modern client.
But there are too few of us to make it worth their while, I guess.
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RE: Good TV
I love the Orville but damn if Star Trek Discovery isn't amazing too.
That's sits just fine with me.
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RE: How do you like things GMed?
@silverfox said in How do you like things GMed?:
How do you approach GMing scenes? What's your way of putting method to the madness? Do you plan things out in depth, or just the broad strokes, or what? How do you decide what people @check and so forth?
The exact way of GMing, to me, isn't very important. It only becomes that for active characters with an existing, ongoing narrative you're trying to enrich and that's a bit of an edge case since most PCs don't fall into that category.
So if we're talking about people I'm not very well familiar with (say, a public +event everyone is allowed to join) my method is this: Give people stuff to do and let them have agency. Make sure to cover for passive players by hand-feeding them plot - you must never, ever be in a standstill where the GM is waiting on players to initiate something and the players are expecting the GM to 'start the next one'. There needs to always be a clear path to involvement. Always. No exceptions.
The only caveat here is if you get the kinds of players (who I love) who like to take charge... let them. Don't railroad it, that's reserved for situations where it's necessary because of the rule above. But provided someone wants to be in the driver's seat then I let them - I want them to - and be ready to respond as needed to expand the overall plot to cover whatever they're trying to do.
TL;DR: My main objective is to give thematic stuff to do for players who might not be engaged in meaningful plot just yet. If that is accomplished and they want more, they get to have it.
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RE: Fitness and Whatnot
There are a ton of articles and resources out there. I'll just drop one here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/upshot/to-lose-weight-eating-less-is-far-more-important-than-exercising-more.html .
For starters you're of course right - it's literally, inescapably a matter of calories in versus calories out. Anything else would violate the principle of conservation of energy. And I of course agree that a combination of a healthier diet and regular exercise works better than either on its own.
However what it comes down to is that cutting calories is by very far more efficient than increasing exercise if one's goal is fat loss.
Any loss of energy (which is debatable - most people experience an excess of it after they start losing fat) as a detriment is countered by the chance for injuries when one tries to work out at a higher rate while overweight and/or out of shape.
A commonly quoted rule of thumb (it's only that, but it's not a bad average) is that a deficit of 3500 calories per week leads to one pound of fat loss. To burn those 500 calories on a daily basis one would need to go at it pretty hard ( http://www.nutristrategy.com/fitness/cycling.htm has a table on that, obviously it's also not entirely accurate universally but it helps as a quick guide), or to eat fewer carbs. An advantage of the latter is that it's easier to not eat those extra cookies through different life circumstances, weather conditions or through personal health issues than it is to dedicate an hour+ of each day to exercise.
As the old axiom has it, six-packs aren't made in the gym, they're made in the kitchen.
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RE: Fitness and Whatnot
One of the biggest issues with fitness bar NONE is that you can't always rely on expert advice. So many articles out there by perfectly valid authors are completely contradicting one another, or claim different things, etc. There's a ton of empirical evidence being portrayed as universal fact, which doesn't help either.
Basically it's really hard to separate fitness half-myths from really useful things. For instance the effect where you increase your metabolism by adding muscle is quite true (more muscle = higher passive energy requirements for the body) but the gains are negligible.
To me at this point it looks like this: The best exercise/diet regime is the one you'll actually do. If it's perfect but you won't do it because it won't fit your lifestyle/situation it's useless to you. On top of it the human body is a great machine, it responds to different approaches, so no one way of working out or eating is the 'right' one.
Pick one. Hell, pick many and try them on for size. Follow whatever you can as well as you can. That's about it.